A Postcard on Amazon Forest Trends

I was surprised by this claim. While Brazil’s law enforcement actions have seriously reduced the incidents of large-scale deforestation (and should be applauded for doing so) the claim that overall recent deforestation rates have fallen did not seem justified by month-to-month data that are often inaccurate. I asked for some science input from Foster Brown, who is a professor of ecology at the Federal University of Acre and a scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center . His current specialty is satellite monitoring and remote sensing of climate and forest events in the western Amazon. Here is his response: I checked the data at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) web site . These are data from DETER, a program for alerting about deforestation events with a minimum detectable size of 25 hectares. (This would be an area approximately the size of 60 football f...